Tuesday, June 12, 2012
The two most destructive totalitarian states in Europe's recent history -- Bolshevik Soviet Union and Nazi Germany -- cooperated since the 1930s until early summer 1941. The cooperation was sealed through a written agreement in Moscow on 23 August 1939. The agreement is known in history books as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The two instigators of the Second World War committed war crimes and crimes against humanity on a scale that was unheard of in modern history.
Germany lost the war and has made amends for its war crimes both at the Nuremberg Trials and later. Soviet Union was victorious and failed to bear its responsibility for the war crimes that it committed in the parts of Europe that it occupied until 1991. The Katyn Massacre, the acts of butchery committed by Soviet partisans in Finland and the Baltic States, as well as the systematic rapes by Soviet troops in "liberated territories" remain uninvestigated.
No independent tribunal has investigated the Soviet crimes of starting destructive wars and of annihilating its own citizens. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has continued to annihilate its own citizens in North Caucasus and has started new illegal wars of occupation in South Caucasus. Present-day Russia still hails wars criminals as heroes; this guarantees that Russia's human rights violations and war crimes will continue.
Now is the last chance to bring the first Soviet war criminal to justice. The Finnish Anti-Fascist Committee calls for those responsible for systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity, for the murder of millions of people and monstrous atrocities, to be brought to justice. As a legal heir to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation needs to acknowledge its responsibility for the dark sides of its history -- for the sake of its own people as well.
Helsinki, 11 June 2012
